Unraveling the Mystery of Articulating Thoughts: A Philosophical Inquiry
Paragraph 1
The gulf between our solitary thoughts and the words that would convey them to others constantly confronts us all. The thoughts we struggle to articulate might be as momentous as a transformative moral epiphany or as ordinary as an insight into a movie or the hurtful behavior of a friend. … In many cases, we articulate these thoughts in order to get clear on what they are; we wouldn’t bother making the effort if they were clear to us already.
Paragraph 2
The experience of getting clear on a thought, with the help of language, has received surprisingly little scrutiny. Philosophers of knowledge influenced by René Descartes have focused almost exclusively on cases in which our knowledge of our thoughts is effortless and instantaneous. For example, turning the key, I might think to myself that the door is shut. No sooner than I have this thought, I know that I think it. … Impressed by the special security of our knowledge of our thoughts in such cases, philosophers have sought to understand it and use it to lay the foundation for all our knowledge. The hard cases, in which we must work to get clear on our opaque thoughts, have gotten far less attention.
Paragraph 3
Linguists, who have studied the abstract rules of grammar and meaning that allow us to comprehend a boundless range of novel thoughts, too, have uniformly evaded the question of how we apply such rules to produce utterances. Noam Chomsky… wrote in 1986 that ‘with regard to the far more obscure production aspect … it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that serious problems are touched on here, perhaps impenetrable mysteries for the human mind.’ Those who did dare to investigate the process of turning thought into speech – such as the psycholinguist Willem Levelt in his pioneering Speaking: From Intention to Articulation (1989) – have largely done so by analysing common slips of the tongue (eg, ‘left’ instead of ‘right’, ‘wish’ instead of ‘fish’) in cases where articulation is quick and devoid of any sense of discovery. Without a comparable method to investigate the hard cases, the prospect of studying them didn’t even arise.
Paragraph 4
And yet, venturing to investigate these cases can illuminate the deeper challenges that we face in articulation, transform our conception of ourselves and our relation to our own thoughts, and help us develop our ideas in other creative pursuits. … Our way into them starts with two observations that seem to contradict each other. The first observation is that articulating our thoughts, in the hard cases, is our way of discovering what we are thinking. … The second seemingly contradictory observation is that articulating our thoughts, in the hard cases, is a purposive activity that doesn’t simply consist in producing words mechanically, in a kneejerk way. The words that immediately come out of us when we are struck by our thoughts (eg, ‘How outrageous!’, ‘What a mess!’) might hardly reflect what we think at all. They could come to us as a result of habit, their repetition by other speakers, or just our affinity for the way they sound.
